How Manageability Tools Support Effective IT Strategies

The six five is back, and we are back from Davos, Switzerland. This is our first podcast that we're doing here. It's great to be back, Dan.

And boy, we talked a lot of AI when we were out there. Uh, a lot of the discussions, right, were, were the, the, the, the one two punch, and that was, okay, we wanna bring this AI in, but we wanna make sure it's resilient. We want to make sure it's safe.

And that even carries through, uh, with client computing. Yeah, it absolutely does. And you know, companies right now, they're trying to find the efficiencies.

They're trying to find the productivity, they're trying to find the reliability, they're trying to find the security. You know, they're really tying threads together. Pat, I talk a lot about IROI and that being a big part of the year, but look, the blocking and tackling the core ability for your workforce to be productive is massive.

And taking it out to the edge, bringing it on device pat, uh, do not be mistaken. Everyone. Client is a big thing.

It's important and it's really where a lot of the work gets done. Yeah, it's, it, it's amazing. Uh, things like resiliency and, and security, uh, get a lot of lip service sometimes when it comes to the forefront, is when there are our outages.

But there are technologies to limit your risks in, increase your resiliency, and I can't imagine a better person to have this conversation with. Then Nove from Intel. Veen, great to see you.

Great to be Back. No, it's great to have you on the show. I mean, as Pat and I were kind of saying in the preamble, I mean, there's not a topic right now that's more front and center than ai, but of course it just, that, it's like that requires so many different partitions, right?

Of what AI is and where it takes place and how it works. And, you know, something we got to spend some time about when we were actually with you in Santa Clara doing a series of six, five videos about a I PCs was, we spent a lot of time talking about the management. I remember that was around the time that there was that massive outage with CrowdStrike, and there was, you know, some significant, uh, determinations of kind of how to blame, how to fault, how to fix, what to do and go forward.

We had some great conversations. And so, you know, I want to, you know, pivot Pat if you both are okay. And talk a little bit about vPro with you.

Talk a little bit about this topic, because frankly, it's refreshing to talk a little bit about more, more about something other than just ai. But like, you know, the refresh, for instance, is a hot topic. The IPC is driving part of it.

Um, you know, how do you see the ability for organizations to kind of balance the, the forging ahead with the most advanced AI enabled tools, but also ensuring that some of those core manageability and functionality tools are still being put into place to optimize performance? Yeah, Absolutely. So someone, uh, uh, when we talked last time, you know, when you think about AI coming into the, uh, enterprise, there's things like content creation and productivity, but really we're, we're focused on what it means for it as well, right?

Um, and for it, you can kind of split it in a few different ways. One is around intelligence on the PC delivering this predictive proactive style PC where it's not it reacting to issues, but rather being more proactive and, and, uh, highlighting what is going on on the PC and taking action to remediate it. And we've seen progress even since last time we talked.

Um, you know, we've been working with, uh, Lakeside who is in the digital employee experience space. And you know, they, they just, uh, announced at CS with us around optimizing for that AI PC hardware that we're delivering into the market. And so what customers are gonna be able to see is AI and intelligence on the PC driven in a efficient way that gives employees a better experience and then delivers cost savings for it.

And that's in the, I would say more inside space, but as we'll, we'll probably talk a little bit more about today when we think about like, remediation, you know, that's like the meat and potatoes of what you need to be able to deliver, uh, in your enterprise. And so that's, that's the, the, the heart of vPro, if you will, in that vPro manageability space where you can get your devices back up and running in a matter of minutes. And so when we think about the outage from, uh, from a few months ago, you know, many, many customers of vPro were able to get back up and running in a matter of minutes, uh, because they could reach those devices regardless of where they are in the world.

And the OS was down, get it patched back up and running, you know, so it's pretty amazing. So let's do a double, let's do a drill down, uh, on that. You know, we pointed out, you know, you had Delta big disruptions.

American seemed to recover a lot faster, uh, as in like, not weeks, but um, hours. And, you know, I do my best research, uh, on social media platforms. That's a joke.

Uh, but my snarky comment that I had with immediately within minutes of seeing this is, okay, it's either old PCs, uh, or old or new PCs that, that they didn't turn on, uh, certain features or they bought brands of PCs that didn't have features where you could do, uh, a fast rollback, right? Or if you put, you know, something got corrupted in the bios, you could update that. But, but I'm curious, let's get a little bit more specific.

How exactly does vPro, uh, assist? And, and I feel I, I know that you've made it easier, uh, as well because there's a lot of organizations who buy it, uh, and some, some don't turn it on. That's right.

Yeah. So with vPro, um, and baked into the hardware, we give customers the ability to, to reach that device regardless of the OS state. So that means, you know, say you can't boot into Windows, what are you gonna do?

Right? Um, and you're either gonna go hunt that device down and manually go in and, and take action. That's not efficient, right?

Um, and largely, uh, a lot of folks, uh, dealing with the outage from a few months ago had to do that, and it's in incredibly painful. Uh, but with vPro, what you end up doing is using, you know, the software either directly from Intel or from, um, your UEM provider, getting direct access to vPro on your own terms, right? You, you go in and activate it and you, you control that flow.

Uh, but what it gives you the ability to do is do remote KVM, um, at a hardware level, so you can frankly go into bios if you wanted, um, or recovery mode, uh, remotely. So, um, in that outage scenario where you couldn't boot into the os, um, folks were going into recovery mode remotely, um, because that device is in constant connection with, uh, um, with the software. So it was fantastic to see those, uh, customers who have vPro and have turned on the management capability, get right in there, get those devices back up and running, um, and like we said in a matter of minutes, uh, versus sending somebody out there touching every single device in your fleet trying to get it back up and running.

Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna drill on that in a minute. Naveen, pat, all I could think about when you were asking the question, talking about the airlines, was you and I standing in line in Zurich when we were leaving Davos and we were trying to, you know, head home and watching this, them trying to turn these terminals on and check people in, and it was like eight people in two hours to check in. I mean, it was just incredible.

And all, you know, you think about, you know, sometimes how, uh, much this equipment ages out and how poorly it's managed at times. And then, you know, the risk, and it's just, to me, I mean, I think we were trying to do the, the math Novem, but I mean, it, it had to be a eight to nine figure difference between American and Delta, both near and long term. Because the thing is, is like you can kind of equate the loss of having the, the time you were down and the refunds you had to give, which you can't, uh, immediately equate is the actual cost of customer that just absolutely was fed up with the situation, uh, employees that took abuse that decided to leave and not come back.

And all of this could have been fixed with a simple manageability tool, which, you know, just absolutely blows my mind. So, you know, that's one use case, but there's obviously a lot of less severe use cases where just having vPro can deal with basic things like intrusion, detections and risk managements, and of course optimization of, of the user. You can drive ROI you can drive cost savings.

You know, you've been looking at this more holistically. What do you see typically when it comes to the value that this tool implementation can create? Yeah, typically what we see, um, is around a two XROI, uh, on, on their investment, which is fantastic, right?

I mean, because you're gonna buy, uh, a PC for your employees anyways, right? So the incremental adder, um, you know, buying a a, a vPro system, you're gonna recoup. Um, and, and that incremental investment, like I said, you see a two extra turn on it, not just because, you know, it essentially protects you out of a global outage like we've been talking about.

But on your day to day, um, you know, uh, environment, you have employees that run into issues, corruption that may not be triggered by a global outage, you still need to be able to step in and remediate those PCs. And the alternative is productivity loss or setting a device back in, or, you know, um, you're going into a IT shop to try to fix it, give 'em a loan or device. None of that is frankly a good employee experience, let alone the cost of trying to ship a device back in and, and get a new device back out.

Um, and so we give, uh, our customers ability to really just get in there, remediate as fast as possible, and get employees back up and running. Uh, it's interesting, we talk about, you know, that global outage, we've seen, uh, estimates of, you know, $5 billion plus, uh, uh, you know, in terms of business loss. Those are direct business losses, let alone productivity loss and things like that.

So when you think about making, um, the choice around what, what PCs you're issuing, um, it's that holistic picture, the day-to-day, you know, how do you get people back up and running, and then the, the assurance that you can deal with a significant outage, um, and get your business back up and running. So that's, that's, uh, what we end up, um, discussing a lot with our customers. Um, and, and that's where they see the value.

So we talked a lot about, uh, airlines and maybe, uh, I forced that in, uh, with the Davos conversation here, but, um, and all the trains, planes and automobiles, uh, we're having. But I, I would suppose that the applicability of vPro is not just for aviation, it, it's for other industries. Maybe, uh, any place that you see an industrial pc, uh, is a, uh, used by, uh, back office, uh, back office workers, seems like there would be some applicability at, do you have a lot of customers in other industries?

Yeah, I mean, we see it all across the board, but I'll give you a specific example. You know, um, back to that outage, I had, uh, a couple, um, hospital networks give me a call during that outage. Like Naveen, I have to send a IT person into an operating room to get a a PC back.

I mean, they've got the, the small form factor PCs plugged into a screen, right? Um, they're, they were having to send it folks into operating rooms to get those back up and running. So I mean, you never want that to happen, right?

Not when I'm getting surgery done, that's for sure. For my family members. Exactly.

So my point there is, uh, you, you see a lot of this, it's not just employees that are dealing with, um, with some of these pains. It's it's across the board. I mean, there's PCs and every nook and cranny of, uh, of a, um, company.

And so you gotta ensure that you can reach those devices, um, and remediate whatever issue might happen. And again, it, it doesn't have to be a global outage, right? If that operating room, uh, PC goes down, do you still wanna send an IT person out there to go fix it or, uh, remediate it remotely?

Um, and so it, the applicability is across the board, but, you know, just to highlight on a, a, a real world example, um, in the, in the hospital network, So Navin, you know, our team is, uh, collectively working on some research that's trying to do a little bit more hypothetical evaluation of what's going on here, customer use cases, um, as well as kind of real, the real consequences, everything we've already talked about throughout this conversation. Um, you know, you've, you've been involved and been interacting throughout this process. Curious, kind of what are some of the insights that, that you found most interesting and what are some of the implications that you're really focused on in terms of how this can help communicate better going forward to get more people to, to work with Intel and with vPro?

Yeah, the one thing that we've heard loud and clear is the simplicity of what customers are asking for. You know, you rewind, um, you know, let's say five years ago to get this remediation capability. Um, it was frankly a, a a difficult process, right?

To you, right? Setting up servers and, uh, installing, uh, software in order to gain access to the out-of-band capability today, right? We've, we've invested so much in modernizing vPro and making it, uh, cloud connected that, uh, you know, we've, we've looked to make it as simple as possible.

Um, and one of the things that we just announced, uh, a couple weeks ago is, um, called vPro Fleet Services. com, log in and, uh, activate vPro manageability, and then, uh, gain access to their power control and remote KVM directly from, uh, that console. So we, we try to make it as simple as possible.

My, my challenge to the team was I wanna see my 8-year-old be able to pull up the site and, uh, and be able to activate vPro and then click the button to get, um, remote KBM. And we've done that. Uh, and so we've really been investing in making sure that, uh, vPro is simple to deploy, simple to use, uh, so that everybody is taking advantage of the manageability capability.

So you're gonna see a lot more, uh, from us in this space to ensure that it's dead simple to use, um, because, um, you know, our customers say they, they're, they need the out-of-band capability. They just need a simple way to get access to it. Well, Naveen, I, I wanna thank you so much for taking the time and going through all this with us.

We see this as a very important trend. We know that the inflection around the next generation of ai, PCs and copilot PCs is going to bring a wave of enthusiasm as software continues to proliferate. Um, we want thinner, we want lighter, we want faster, and of course we want more manageable.

Um, and I think sometimes that that last part maybe gets missed. And hopefully everybody that's out there listening to us right now and, and, and joining in this conversation, reading Patrick and my commentary, reading the collective commentaries from our firms, um, really understands this. And the fact is that there's 7, 8, 9 figure risks that go with large fleets and deployments, because really keeping systems up and running is a much bigger deal than just access to your pc.

So Naveen, let's do this again sometime soon. Thanks so much for joining the six five. Uh, it was great to see you.

Yeah, great to see you guys again. And thank you everybody for tuning into this episode of this six five, this special webcast brought to you in partnership with Intel. We appreciate everybody tuning in, being part of our community.

Subscribe. Join us for all of the great content here on the six five. We gotta say goodbye for now.

But we'll see you all really soon. Bye-bye.